Rolling Stone: April 2013

For all the scorn aimed in the direction of Rolling Stone magazine by Kurt Cobain, it’s a tricky job detaching the history of Nirvana from that publication. Even the other week, the magazine gave the most extensive coverage of the anniversary of Kurt Cobain’s demise even if there was little new added to a very familiar tale. Looking further back, the most well-known images of Kurt Cobain and Nirvana are primarily taken from photo shoots done for the magazine, all those t-shirts and posters of the guy’s sad-eyed face, the front cover of With the Lights Out; we’re staring at Rolling Stone magazine. Similarly, sometime in late 1992, Rolling Stone contributor Michael Azerrad was requested to write the official account of the band as part of the efforts to counteract the fallout of the Vanity Fair piece. To this day the book he created, Come as You Are, is the most quoted source of material on Nirvana and the ur-text to which all other accounts have harked back to. In essence, and in spite of flaws (an awful lot of people have fair reason to feel they were portrayed negatively and/or selectively), Michael created the bible on Nirvana, another win for Rolling Stone. Even Kurt’s semi-protest t-shirt when he first posed for them has become iconic.

Anyways. You’ll have noted the early posting hour. I have a train to catch in one hour, 3.08am, a flight taking off at 5.45am. It’s holiday time. Hopefully something that will bring more time to create for here. Do bear with me. Oh, and do please cross your fingers that the walk across Battersea isn’t like that time the Police had thrown up a cordon thanks to that teeny-tiny incidence when the two guys had been kneecapped up on Falcon Road. That was most irksome when trying to stroll down in the early hours.